I downloaded finally and have played a tiny bit. One thing that is bad for me is you have to be online. And it looks like all you do is one task after another? It is better than I expected from the trailer, but odds are I will delete it very soon.

I would play a tad more if on my PC. If I could just purchase for about 5 bucks outright. As it stands I expect it will be gone. I have other games on my ipad I like much more and they are ones that you do not have to play online.

It's empty on content. The opening looked really promising ... but then, ... you just get stuck doing repetitive tasks, grinding skills and items and selling them in order to continue doing the same. Meh, was good while it lasted.

Well, the game does differ with Sims in some key aspects. You do not control the character you create and they have no needs. The similarities are that you can customise your character and you can build and furnish their homes. It's what you do with the game's currency. And the characters look remarkably similar to Sims 4 models.

The gameplay is overly simple, you have job requests, you collect or make the items which you need thoughts for (they too take time to collect), they take a certain amount of real time (but you can queue lots at the same time) and then you hand them in. You get coins and xp. That's pretty much it. There's some social component to the game but I haven't really tried it out. I've been able to do a lot in the game without getting roadblocks, you can get by pretty well without spending any real money, unlike Freeplay. Someone would probably be tempted in spending if they really want some furniture or clothes, but the goals themselves are easy enough to achieve on their own. For instance, I'm currently at the top of the leaderboard in the Halloween event against the people I was matched with. I never spend a penny on free to play games (and usually don't play them for long since they make roadblocks for you).

Downsides of the game is that it's very much just doing the same things over and over again. There isn't much you can do and due to the lack of control over the character, you can't, for instance, tell them to go read a book. It also lacks very much in the sound department, lots of the game would be silent if not for the music. I also find it a little lame that your character doesn't do more interactions with things. Even if I can't control her, I'd still like to see her interact with the world more.

Overall it's ok, not great not bad - at the very least it provides competition. Just as a point of reference, I have a love-hate relation to Freeplay. It would be a decent mobile game if the tasks were reasonably timed, it's got a lot of content but the Sims look super dated. And the biggest problem is having to unlock everything, which would take forever to do if you are against spending any money. I prefer games I can pay outright but that's just me. I'm going to try out The Sims Mobile when it comes out too but don't expect it to be much better than Freeplay apart from aesthetics maybe.

The thing about video games is that you can copyright them only in name. As much as EA has the monopoly on the life simulator genre, even a blatant ripoff of The Sims is still going to be more than different enough legally. Here's how far the similarities have to go for EA to whip out their lawyers:

Quote:

The complaint includes many side-by-side screenshot comparisons of the two games, showing the obvious similarities. For example, in The Sims, characters can be an Athlete, Creative, Romantic, Socialite, Tycoon or Villain. In The Ville, characters can be a Jock, Artist, Charmer, Partier, Mogul or Scoundrel.
The mimicry even boils down to the exact skin tones you can select for your character. Noting that RGB values result in more than 16 million different colour combinations, EA's complaint says "there is an infinitesimally small chance that the use of the same RGB values for skin tone in The Ville as The Sims Social is mere coincidence."

And let's not forget that "unpopular" genres, of which the life simulator genre is a prime example, are often plagued by unoriginal gameplay. It's VERY hard to create a truly original concept, ESPECIALLY when there's only one other series to take inspiration from. With something like a city builder, at least you have franchises left and right to be inspired by. You can consider SimCity, Cities XL, ANNO, The Settlers, the City Building franchise, or even Age of Empires or Civ. With life sims it's either The Sims or any one of the other poorly thought out ripoffs.

(And I've spent many afternoons putting together a set of features for a hypothetical Sims game. I'm still not completely done, though I've had some very interesting ideas.)

This is why I cant play these types of mobile games. That angle, all that clutter with no interactions, all that clutter with one interaction (that is solely based on the passage of time)..... hyperventilation instantly.

Yeah... I'm not much of a mobile gamer. I absolutely despise micro-transactions, and mobile gaming is plagued with them. I tried this but it just wasn't all that interesting and didn't hold my attention for very long at all.

It's definitely not my cup of tea that's for sure. No real point or challenge in any of the gameplay. Kindergarten actually... Press this here to generate stuff, use that stuff to make stuff, buy stuff with that stuff. Meh. At least with The Sims they attempt to make grinding for cash more entertaining with skills.

I really wish someone would do a game to rival sims in a serious way. I like sims 4 and love sims 2 and 3 but it I would be interested to see what another life simulator could be like with another company. I think it hasn't yet because it would always just be compared to the sims? It's hard to imagine HOW someone could do it without it resembling sims. But with more and more people complaining as each new game comes out, you'd think some big gaming company would have jumped on it by now. Like cities skylines - a lot of people say it's way better then simcity. Or Planet coaster - it does well as a roller coaster tycoon type game. I want to see another company take on life simulation.